Stop bossing me around!!!!

[Liliuokalani]

My emotional flashback of the day. I'm not sure how triggering this would be to anyone else, I'm not really going to be describing anything especially traumatizing, it's just a surefire way to put me into an emotional flashback.

I'm just trying to be a good med student. But I know that residents and attendings sigh and roll their eyes and try to ignore students unless you prove that you are somehow useful. At least at the hospitals I rotate in, students are not that welcome, even though we are the ones that will be in charge one day, so maybe ignoring us is not the best approach to teaching. Alas, doctors don't have teaching degrees. Sorry any doctors who are on here. I will probably be offending a medical professional in some way or another during this explanation. I'm sorry. I've been a medical assistant, an EMT, my mom was a nurse, and it seems like each one rants about the other all day.

Today I managed to be useful. I scrounged around the ER, begged nurses to help me find things, looked in every nook and cranny, and then proudly produced suture kits and supplies for cleaning out a wound. It was a big moment for me, I'm usually far too insecure to ask for help because I know I'll get brushed off more often than not and it becomes a little too much to take. I usually give up because supplies in an ER are touch to find and they always seem to be migrating. But I found them all! What's more, I know stuff! I know how to remove sutures, I know how to suture, I know how to clean a wound. It was my big day to know stuff. And then things quickly spiraled out of control.

I was trying to help a suturing procedure. The child involved was freaking out. A lot. So it became a bigger procedure. Well suddenly everyone needs to become the hero. The most condescending pediatric anesthetist came into the procedure, belittled everyone in the room including the head ED attending in the pediatric department, and it was bothering me. The peds attending then got irritated by that and started berating the poor resident for not being prepared for suturing, even though he was. The nurses then decided they needed to feed off that energy and, as usual, went after the students.

The anesthetist was doing things like expecting the resident to suture in the dark. I suggested turning on one light and she said "NO!" But a nurse turned on the light and she said nothing. Anesthetist then asks me to stand on the other side of the patient. Nurse then starts barking at me about how my head is in the way of her vitals machine and why was I standing there and I need to do this and that and the other. She would not knock it off until I was like "look, the attending told me to stand here" and then it was suddenly ok, but then I better put the armrail down because I don't know, my arms will break off or something if I don't. There was no point to putting the armrail down at that moment. None.

Then as I'm trying to assist in handing off supplies to anesthetist the nurse practitioner student decides she knows more than me and starts mumbling in my ear that I need to do this and I'm doing that wrong. At this point I'm about to flip out. And then I'm like if you know so much better than me then you do it instead of standing back and telling me what to do. And she was continuously telling me the WRONG thing to do. You are a student! What makes you think you know so much more than me!

Same NP student then started jumping in front of me to see things the resident would point out on a patient. She would stand in my way even when I asked her politely to move. So then I "accidentally" knocked her to the side to see a patient and just started ignoring just about everything she said to me. The nurses also tried to lecture me on putting my purse on the floor, as if lockers were going to appear out of thin air. No one lets students have lockers. If we put things on desks the nurses freak out more. We are like homeless people being scattered left and right.

I realize I'm exaggerating. Because it's HUGELY TRIGGERING for me. My family, whenever there is some small disaster or stressor, will all turn on me because I'm the only one not freaking out. When my mom was in the hospital I was regularly attacked for the smallest reasons. I was trying to make a pizza to help out my sister and dad one night and they literally stood over me and criticized every step of the process. When I get visibly frustrated they turn on me more. Oh well, I guess you can't take critisism very well. I don't know why you're freaking out. Or condescendingly, awwwwww, you're trying so hard, it's ok, you'll do better next time.

I get it now. They were angry that I was calm. I knew what my mom had and I knew she was most likely not dangling on the verge of death like she made it seem. She's uBPD and any health condition she has she just lets fester and when she finally goes to the doctor and it's gotten really bad, she spirals into a depression and states that she has almost died on several occasions. Anyone that questions this is personally attacking her, and you will then be attacked by the family that rallies around her dysfunction to call themselves good people. Every doctor she meets is either her savior or trying to kill her. I do not participate. So I am viciously attacked.

My family has for years tried to attack me to feel more in control. And, like in my family, when at the hospital, if I try to say look, I don't like it when you do that, could we please work on communication, I know I will get backlash. Because I'm a lowly student and I should be grateful and I know nothing. But I do know something. I know how to be an empathetic human. But that's not ok. So I keep my mouth shut and am typically reduced to crying in the bathroom for hours afterward and not knowing why. In places where I know I will be heard, or I know the consequences don't affect my future career, I have no problem speaking my mind. Not here. They have too much power over me. And I HATE IT.

Right now, for example, I'm typing a super long rant and angry at the injustice of it all. I'm still working on that.

STOP BOSSING ME AROUND!

[Kizzie]

 It sounds like bad behaviour abounds at work and home so rant away,   

[rtfm]

Liliuokalani, I'm in a totally different industry, and long since not a student anymore, but I had a very similar thing happen to me tonight with a client and it isn't the first time.  I wish I could look at the interaction and shrug it off like my colleagues do - the guy is clearly horrid, and everybody can see it.  So I should be able to read the email and say "meh, idiot." and move on with life.

But instead I wound up on an hourlong adrenaline/rage spike that I couldn't tone down and just stood in a corner with all my muscles tensed, and shaking.  Total overreaction, all because the guy triggered a massive emotional flashback to daily life with my dad. Some ignorant, powerful, jerk says some stupid thing that anybody could see makes HIM, not me, look bad but puts me in a no-win situation....and I react like my life is in danger.  Full-on EF of the worst possible kind. My entire evening gone because some ignorant jerk says some stupid thing and I'm flashed back to that totally powerless, totally unjust state with my dad where any direct engagement would result in an emotional and verbal deathmatch that required my complete humiliation and capitulation before it could end, and silence and walking away would result in a terrifying rage from him and days of punishment by my charming mother.  As an adult, my response to this particular EF is white hot rage (an overage of repressed fight response?), which isn't the most professional or productive of things to feel. 

I get road rage like this too.  It's the powerless feeling, the knowing you have to do "the right thing" and will never get an apology or even acknowledgement even though the other person is behaving really, really badly. Being trapped and forced into something that's unfair.  I hate this feeling more than any other feeling in the world.  Like to the point that I choose my living situation around public transit so I don't have to drive and do my best to get out of other situations where I feel it coming on. I really don't want my tombstone to read "she died of impotent rage."

With work, which is unavoidable, I play a dangerous game where I type exactly what I want to say, into an email response to the offender, and then I erase it.  If I'm not paying attention, one tiny slip could "send."  It may sound stupid, but it lets me regain my power and locus of control.  It says, yeah, I feel this way, and I'm justified in it, and I could hit send, but unlike jerk-at-work I am in control of how I present myself to the world.  Unlike jerk-at-work, I refuse to belittle others publicly, to question others' intelligence in email, to point fingers or make unfounded accusations or, basically, show my arse.  I also refuse to engage with disrespectful and narcissistic behavior; I can't control jerk-at-work's opinion of me, but I can refuse to indulge his bad behavior by not dignifying any of it with a response.  It's a tiny, tiny victory, but it's mine.  Also it's better than destroying my company's reputation to fight with a narcissist.

It sucks to be triggered this way, to feel so powerless in the face of the injustice.  It sucks to know that this isn't justice, it's a type of capitulation.  I've basically decided that dealing with a fleeting annoyance at capitulating is better than dealing with the fallout of saying something I regret.....and only after some really ugly instances where I didn't make that decision.  Sounds like you're way ahead of me and have learned to avoid that regret - good on you. It's definitely the better way to go.

I say to the jerks-at-work: YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME.  And one day, I'll believe it.

[Liliuokalani]

I am the same way, I get in a white hot, angry rage! And feel totally powerless. One chief resident freaked out on us one morning because people showed up five minutes late. FIVE. MINUTES. And he FLIPPED. OUT. He pounded on the table, lectured us all for like ten minutes with a crazy shaky voice, and then stormed out and slammed the door. If an attending had witnessed this, he probably would not have been able to be chief resident anymore. I flinched when he slammed the door, no one else seemed to. And I was pissed. But what made me even more angry was that NO ONE ELSE seemed to feel this way. People either angrily agreed with him or cowered and said oh well, he's the chief, there nothing we can do. I had many angry rants throughout the day, desperately trying to rally people to my side I guess, got read in the face and started arguing with a cranky kid at the end of the day who decided it was a good idea to shout "ok so everyone needs to start showing up on time now" because he had forced us all to stay late as punishment. What's more, I was the short call student, the student of the day that stays a couple hours longer to help out residents and update the patient list, and anytime I asked the chief a question he just glared at me for a minute and then answered. So I just kind of blankly stared back at him. That made me feel a little more satisified.

By the end of the night, I was SOBBING. I was so angry and upset. The next day I spent mostly curled up in a ball trying not to cry, and all the other students were avoiding me, which is not really what I would do if I saw someone that upset, I would ask if they wanted to talk at least, but whatever. I'm not still angry about it or anything...

I had no idea why I felt that way. I had no idea it was an EF. And I think you're right. There were so many times I never felt safe to fight, I would do pretty much all the other F's. Because it wasn't safe to fight. My dad was pretty dangerous, and he was my mom's bodyguard, and he would protect her blindly, never spending a moment on my side of the story. It was paralyzing. And I still feel that paralysis to this day. And so I also feel a strong urge to want to fight. Sometimes I do. And sometimes the consequences aren't that bad. But sometimes I meet yet another PD'ed person in some sort of power over me and they just make the EF's worse. Ugh! Medicine attracts crazy people!